Mageia 2: release cycle, support and planning

We’ve had discussions in the Mageia community, to decide about the Release cycle of future versions of Mageia. We started with some proposals and everybody was able to comment and discuss.

The outcome of our discussions: the release cycle for Mageia will be 9 months. We think it’s a well-balanced choice, providing an up-to-date distribution that’s also stable. It should also give us enough time to build the specifications, develop, package, innovate and finalize it.

Each Mageia release will be supported for 18 months. We will have a global review of our resources before next release to check that we can still provide support according to our first plan. If all is going well, then we will think about releasing a LTS (Long Term Support) version every 18 months, to be supported for 3 years.

Development planning for Mageia 2 has tried to take into account all the comments coming from our Mageia 1 post-mortem. Here’s the timeline:

Freezes date are the one after we cannot upload new “Version”, “artwork’ pieces, or “Release”.
Version is referring to software version in upstream project, while release is the package version inside Mageia distribution

Would it be possible to support each release for at least one month after the actual n+2 release date, please? This would mean 19 months + slippage instead of 18, probably not much more difficult for the developpers (end-of-life distributions have most kinks worked out).
It would allow users to remain supported even if they missed a release for some reason, and to wait for the initial flurry of post-release bug corrections and work-arounds (or simply to find the free time required to upgrade).

Ubuntu forun (it) is not the best place (and ubuntu for me is not the best distro!), but is a forum with 500-800 users online average …:-) … I’m sorry! I hope the good upgrade system (for new versions) ….
Thank for reply!

The release cycle for Mageia will be 9 months, that is sad news. I think the best release cycle for mageia is to be a “rolling distro” like PCLinuxOS. Because sometimes you don’t have time to be installing and setting up the system again and again, dealing with graphic, video and sound cards, printer, scanners and other stuffs, that bother and upset the end-users. Please, think in the end-users of Mageia (easier setting up, updates, nice artwork and no re-installing Mageia every 9 months).
Michael

Yes, this is thinking about the end-user. The decision was based on the public discussion of end-users and contributors which has been going on for a long time (several months). Of course there were many different ideas, suggestions, opinions, but the summary of all that combined with the technical facts and a realistic view on the ressources of Mageia led to the decision you could read in the blog.
If your only point is the repeated need for installation and setup every 9 months, you can always do system upgrades from one version to the other as most people do who do not want to do the installation dance too often.

“Versions freeze: 06/02/2012”
Out of context this might be 3-Jun-2012 or 6-Feb-2012. ISO 8601 recommends to use YYYY-MM-DD (i.e. 2012-02-06) as the date format. This might reduce guesswork, sorts easily on computers and avoids culture clashes.